Caen Memorial Centre for History and Peace, Normandy Only a few miles from the D-Day landing beaches, the comprehensive museum offers a European take on the invasion of Normandy, what led up to it and what came next.

Photo: Spud Hilton, The Chronicle

Caen Memorial Centre for History and Peace, Normandy Only a few...

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Visitors are reflected in the mirrors of the rift-like entrance at the Caen Memorial Centre for History and Peace. The museum is a few miles from the some of the landing beaches used in the Invasion of Normandy in WW II.

Photo: Ann Head Hilton, Special To The Chronicle

Visitors are reflected in the mirrors of the rift-like entrance at...

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Among the artifacts at the Caen Memorial is the head of a bronze statue found in the ruins of Caen. The head had been knocked off by a bomb fragment.

Photo: Spud Hilton, The Chronicle

Among the artifacts at the Caen Memorial is the head of a bronze...

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Permanent sculpture outside the Caen Memorial Centre for History and Peace in Caen, France.

Photo: Ann Head Hilton, Special To The Chronicle

Permanent sculpture outside the Caen Memorial Centre for History...

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Displays covering the sequence of events leading up to the beginning of World War II flank a walkway that circles a giant blue globe at the Caen Memorial.

Photo: Spud Hilton, The Chronicle

Displays covering the sequence of events leading up to the...

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National WWII Museum, New Orleans The museum has expanded to include another theater, a stage for live shows, a restaurant and the U.S. Freedom Pavilion (pictured above), a showroom for restored World War II-era planes and vehicles.

Photo: Spud Hilton, The Chronicle

National WWII Museum, New Orleans The museum has expanded to...

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"I Like Ike" dolls of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in the gift shop of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.

The thin, blue booklet inside the brightly lit case seemed ordinary enough. A pocket-size French phrasebook, an item that tourists by the millions have brought to Normandy at one time or another.

But this worn paperback told more of a story, in part because it was flanked in the case by a green tin of sunscreen, a small brown bottle of halazone tablets for "purifying drinking water in canteens," a pair of brass knuckles and a semiautomatic Colt .45 M1A1 handgun.

Ordinary items used to free the world.

The display of supplies that soldiers were issued just before the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy is one of many at the Caen Memorial Centre for History and Peace that paint a broader picture of that war and France's role in it, as well as the Cold War conflicts that followed.

But even with the thousands of photos, quotes, documents, video and audio recordings, firsthand accounts, and artifacts, it still represents one angle of an invasion and battle that arguably are among the most important history-shaping events in the past two centuries, if not longer.

Fortunately, there are other museums that cover similar territory, not that counter the perspective or rewrite the history, but that help fill in the gaps with different accounts and artifacts, allowing visitors to see more clearly the whole.

In an attempt to get that even broader view of an event that so thoroughly shaped today's Europe, within the span of 14 months I visited the Caen Memorial in Normandy, the National WWII Museum (formerly the National D-Day Museum) in New Orleans and the Churchill War Rooms in London. Each has its strengths and viewpoint, but, as with the Allied forces, it seemed more important to look at how the three museums collaborate in telling the story that has as many angles as survivors. Especially as, 70 years later, the perspectives of the survivors - and the survivors themselves - are fading away.

(There also is a D-Day Museum at Portsmouth, the most important of the Operation Overlord launch sites in England, but I chose the Churchill War Rooms for a personal look at Britain's view through the man historians have called "the personification of the war effort.")